If you’ve ever owned/used a vice with steel jaws, you’ll know that using it on soft delicate parts can result in damage. You can get fibre faced brackets that clip over the existing jaws, providing a sacrificial surface, but these are pretty unsightly and have a tendency to wander about and/or fall off.
Now I had a solution looking for a problem, also know as 3D printer, it seemed like printing plastic soft jaws would be an interesting experiment if nothing else.
Obviously these are printed in PLA at 100% infill, that is to say completely solid, otherwise they would be useless at their intended purpose. I didn’t really have high hopes for this concept, but surprisingly they work really well! Except for the rare occasions I really need a good grip of something, they live on the vice more or less permanently. I printed another set, anticipating a high wear rate, but again I have been pleasantly surprised at how resilient they are.
One thing I’ve had on my mind to do but never got around to is to make a selection of jaws suitable for gripping shafts of various diameters; definitely a project for the future.